Lion

It's always nice to see a Brit nominated for an academy award but I must admit I was fairly surprised to see the floppy haired Dev Patel up for the best supporting actor gong , especially as he dominated the second half of the movie Lion as former Indian street child Saroo, a boy seperated from his Indian family by a quirk of fate who was brought up by an adoptive Australian family thousands of miles from his rural dirt poor native village.

I was reminded of the movie as I watched the dogs and Albert lying in their untidy heaps on the bed this morning for in one sad pivotal scene a handful of Calcutta Street Children are seen huddling together for warmth and comfort on cardboard beds by the side of the road.

The sobering truth is that these Street Children are not just  figments of a Hollywood screen writer's mind. They are real sad little scraps who don't know the comforts that a handful of terriers and a wide eyed black cat enjoy in a small Welsh village.

The astonishing Sunny Pawar

Lion is an interesting, uneven movie. The first half is literally stunning. It is a total assault on the senses as we follow the ever chirpy five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) and his ever loving mother ( Pryanka Bose) and hero worshiped older brother Guddu ( Abishek Bharate) in their dirt poor rural existence in central India.
Saroo is seperated from his family, and by an odd quirk of fate transported over a thousand miles to Calcutta where he survives on the dangerous streets for months until adopted by an Australian couple from Tasmania.
This chapter of Saroo's life is true heart in the mouth stuff thanks primarily to the child actor Pawar who literally breaks your heart with his solemn face  and doleful eyes.
Unfortunately the whole pace of the film grinds to a halt soon after, as we then follow the continuing story of Saroo, a man living a fairly loving and comfortable life with his Australian parents  (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) Saroo ( Dev Patel) is conflicted by submerged memories of his former life and after a long period of reflection and research ( with too many scenes of the angst Patel staring off into the middle distance) the adult Saroo is finally reunited with his mother in a tearful sob fest finale.

Now Patel is undoubtedly moving in his role as the adult Saroo and I sincerely hope that he nabs the Oscar for his performance, but for me the real dramatic punch of Lion is the honest, naturalistic turn by the baby faced Sunny Pawar that really lingers long in the mind
8/10

No McDonalds!

Alice's comments in yesterday's post tickled me.

She thought that when I referred to buying  a sneaky egg mcmuffin, we actually had a McDonalds in the village! 

Today, I've been playing with my ipad doodle! 

It gives you all a bit of a flavour of where things are in Trelawnyd 

The positions of everything shown on the map are very general!

1  Our Cottage
2  The Ukrainian Village
3  Trendy Carol
4  The Church
5  Animal helper Pat
6  Village Helper Islwyn
7   The School
8   Gay Gordon/Big Mary
9   Mrs Frazer
10 Mrs Trellis
11 Gop Hill
12 Village Centre, Auntie Glads, Harmonika,High Street
13  Memorial Hall
14  Chapel
15  Affable Despots
16  Old Post Office
17  The Crown Pub
18  Village Green, Cameron the boffin

" It looks mighty fine" 

The Pussy march impressed me. 

Garfield Had It Right

I was going to blog about those chance conversations you have in the street, when you live in an odd little place like Trelawnyd, but a set of strange morning circumstances have taken over somewhat and these have overshadowed a somewhat surreal conversation I had with Mrs Frazer outside the pensioner bungalows yesterday which culminated with her pulling down her blouse in order if I could confirm her GP's preliminary diagnosis of shingles!

Now, the sun is shining, and all is well with the world.
Earlier, this was not quite the case.
I was out last night until 1.30 am and crawled into bed around a quarter to two.
The Prof's alarm went off just after 5 am I was due to drive him to the station at 6 am in order to catch the Edinburgh train!
You with me?
Anyhow things were ok until I dropped him at the station where he realised that he had forgotten to locate the whereabouts of an important document.
No problem.......could I find it and email him the fact!
He caught the train
I drove home and ripped the cottage to pieces to locate the document
No luck.
The prof got off his train somewhere in England, and promptly caught another returning to the station where I picked him up. Again, I, drove him home where he located the aforemntioned document within 30 seconds of walking through the door!!!!
I could have ripped his smug expression right off his face!
Then for the third frigging time I drove him back to the staition so that he could recommence his journey.
By this time I was late taking William to the vets for his appointment so he and I shot up to the surgery via Mc Donald's drive through where I ordered an egg McMuffin and large coffee for me and hash brown for him!
Even a stressed middle aged homosexual and a half blind Welsh terrier needs breakfast!
Anyway
I stopped at the  busy T junction at St Asaph where I took a massively comforting bite of muffin and a huge swig of coffee and in front of several school children standing for their school bus  promptly sneezed my whole mouth's contents onto the steering wheel and windscreen.....

What did Garfield always say at the beginning of the week?

" Ok Monday........hit me! "

La La Land

I was in two minds about seeing LaLa Land.
On the one hand come the multiple plaudits from the critics
On the other.......anecdotal so so reviews from ordinary cinema goers.
So I went with an open mind.

As it turned out, La La Land is a sweet movie; a modern day musical which starts as it means to go on with commuters stuck in sunbright LA traffic singing and dancing around their cars in a multicoloured explosion of bon vivre! 
The story is suitably cheesy.
Aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone) meets up with Jazz bore Sebastian ( Ryan Gosling) a pianist down on his luck.
Over a year we witness their courtship in Los Angeles, the " city of dreams" as both try their best to attain their dreams in Hollywood and it's a courtship punctuated with a whole plethora of musical set pieces with the leads singing and dancing on the Hollywoods Hills, on the Warner Brothers' back set and and in one magical sequence weightless inside the city's planetarium!
Gosling is delightful as the puppy eyed Sebastian, playing the piano as easily as he sings and dances.
Stone is impressive too and almost steals the film with a plucky charm and warmth. They are incredibly sweet in their many scenes together.
La La Land doesn't quite reinvent the Hollywood musical, but it does kick start the genre somewhat.
Having said this I could done without the Jazz ( I am not a lover of it) and some of the final quarter of the movie sags just a tiny bit, but I dare you to watch the powerhouse sequence of Mia's final audition    
( sung by Stone as the camera revolves around her) without crying...it's a lovely bit of cinema.
8/10

Gravitas

A rough looking type and his missus parked their car behind the cottage in order to check over the plot of land which is up for sale just up the lane
He half blocked old Trevor's driveway and returning home Trevor beeped his horn for the bloke to move.
" You can get a fucking bus through there!" the man snapped angrily and taking an instant dislike to him I stopped the dogs as I passed
" He's an old man and he needs you to move your car!" I said carefully giving the man a very direct look and irritably he did as he was instructed, scowling at me as he did so
Only when I returned home did I realise what I was wearing

My " plucked chicken" hat does not quite give me the gravitas I thought I possessed!

I'm sick of all of this bad news.....

....hate....all of the bad feeling..........

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm had the right idea

Let's be optimistic 

U-S-A

The Prof and I have just been watching the inauguration on tv

Baby Boomers

I found myself explaining the phenomenon of " The Baby Boomer" to a 25 year old colleague the other day...they had not heard the phrase before, and why would they? What do they know of those " oldies" that were born between 1948 and 1964.
I was born in 1962, so just came in under the wire as did one other nurse on duty, and the younger staff seemed genuinely  surprised as we brainstormed baby boomer norms! Norms that would make modern parents run screaming to child protective services!


As children my sister and I would sit in a living room as my parents would chain smoke cigarettes until the walls ran brown with nicotine.

My father would drive us all home after babysitting my sister's kids on a Saturday night much the worse for drink!

No one ever Ever wore seat belts!

We used to walk 2 miles to and from school alone and in the dark with shorts on!

If you ever was allowed to use the home phone you had to sit in a cold hallway to do so ( and were timed! )

One playtime venue was the local rat infested public tip!

The coal fire heated a small square of the living room nothing else

We ate left overs on Monday and were often served things like mince, liver and onions and offal

Had a bath only on Sunday nights!

We coped with three tv channels and no daytime tv on weekdays ( unless you watched school programmes!)

Relatives and perfect strangers could reprimand you and be supported in the fact by your mother and father

Every winter there was snow

Being Heard

I once nursed a woman who had been seriously ill for several months.
For much of that time she was unconscious, floating between life and death and that strange half world in between,  where the body is propped up with drugs, and machines and that tenuous strength a body shows when the chips are down. Later during her admission, her sedation was finally turned off and her tracheostomy uncuffed in an attempt to get her body to function on it's own.
In the middle of the night as I was administering medication through her nasogastric tube, her eyes opened, they were watery red and tired .
I asked her if she was in pain and she shook her head .I asked her if she knew where she was and she mouthed the word " hospital" and as I pottered around doing nursey things she reached out a weak arm and touched my face with her hand.
Moments later she cried out with an unearthly wail.
This was followed by another and another... each one louder than the last and there was something almost animalistic in the way it sounded.
I hurried to the bedside.
No she was not in physical pain, that was the first question I asked again, but again and again she cried out like a baby does when it is distressed in the night .
I tried to placate her. I massaged her hands with cream in an effort to sooth her and I tried to engage her in a way of diverting her distress but finally, as she half spoke half whispered the words " I want to " I realised that finding her voice was a final statement of " I'm here and I feel so bad" 
Her cries validated her.

It was hard but I gathered my nursing notes in order to write a report of the night and closed the side room door to the main ward. With them on my knee I quietly sat next to her and started to write my notes as she shrieked and wailed like an banshee.
Twenty minutes later she had cried herself to sleep..

*****************************************************************

Postscript to this week's dog attack.

Arrrhhh the power of the blog......this afternoon the owner of the husky called around to the cottage to discuss the dogfight on Tuesday evening.
She had read the blog and wanted to put things straight which was very big of her and we had a frank and open discussion about the incident.
The husky, as I thought,  is a somewhat damaged animal. She is clearly cared for by a devoted owner who understands dog psychology but the bitch indeed sounds a bit of a nightmare to care for due to previous abuse and trauma and by the sounds of things the owner has done everything in her power to rectify her problems.
I finally suggested a dog trainer I have heard of who specializes in aggressive large dogs and we parted on good terms.
I wish her and her dog well.

Frantic Fanny Friction

I'm glad I'm working tonight.
I'm somewhat jaded with ideas that backfire, and need a night of peace with bleeping ventilators and screaming monitors.
Talking to like minded friends and colleagues would be good too!

Mary and Winnie ( like women do I am reliably informed) have synchronized their seasons and as the elderly eunuchs William and George sleep their relaxed old dog sleep, the girls have embarked on an extended, strenuous and rather unsavoury bout of simulated sex play.
When we first bought Mary we played around with the plan that one litter of puppies would be a grand idea but with all of this puffing and panting and rubbing of toilet parts upon toilet parts

I think I have changed my mind.

Dog Attack

There must be perhaps fifty dogs in the village.
All sizes and all temprements.
Just three are overly agressive. A fat black labrador from the other side of Trelawnyd, Dr Barnsley's mongrel Meg ( who for some unknown reason hates the terriers) and a white husky type dog from Erw Wen.
The last two are big dogs and it troubles me somewhat that their owners have real trouble controlling them in the street.
Uncontrollable dogs are dangerous dogs plain and simple.
Last night when I took William and Mary out for their last walk we ran into the white husky.
He was on one side of the main road and we were  perhaps sixty feet away on the other. It was very dark so old William with his cataracts was unaware of his presence . Mary however saw him and stopped dead in her tracks.
The husky's owner stiffened and started to wrap it's lead around his hand but the husky on seeing the Welsh terriers lurched forward barking furiously.
I don't know if the lead snapped or it's collar slipped but suddenly the dog burst free and attacked.
In the couple of seconds it took to dart across the road ( stopping the traffic)  I managed to position myself between it and the terriers behind me and as it lunged towards them I kicked it  hard in the head.
The husky hesitated so I bellowed at it to keep away and stamped at it again and moments later  frightened by me, the stopped car's headlights and it's panicked owner  the husky galloped off in the direction of home.

We were lucky last night for William and Mary are no match for such an aggressive dog.
Winnie, with her bulk, and intelligence could fend off such an assault but a blind elderly terrier such as William and a delicate juvenile like Mary could well have been seriously injured or even killed.
Large aggressive  breeds are often kept as status symbols with little thought given to their potential

I know that this husky has not been socialised with other dogs. It is only walked in the " safety " of deserted night streets by an owner who has not been trained to deal with it.
I aim to tell the owner this when I see him.
I didn't have the chance last night
Hopefully it will be at a time when emotions run just a little calmer.

" How's William?" And Cramming My Fat Arse into Budgie Smugglers!

Today's blog will be much of a missmash.

Most of the day I've been catching up with jobs .
The Prof now has a functioning curtain pole in his office and curtains that close!
And Winnie almost whipped herself into hysterics as a water main in the village burst, flooding our lane with water and over half a dozen workmen in overalls turned up to repair the damage!
I mooched around trying to find fucking curtain hooks for an age too, but I won't tell you about that saga, it's just too exciting a read.
At B&Q a woman I didn't know stopped me at the power tool aisle and asked how William was.
Apparently she reads Going Gently regularly ! I love all this minor celebrity shit so went all magnanimous in the meeting and promised to take off my " no anonymous commentating"  sanction so she can leave me a comment.
" let's hope Petra doesn't reappear" she said
People have long memories I thought.
I didn't falter in Sainsbury's so not a scotch Egg was bought, but I did but 40 mini cocktail sausages ass a treat for the dogs ( Winnie can get at least ten into her mouth at once!) I'm back weightwatching as we have two trips abroad to look forward to this year and I need to squeeze my fat arse into my best tropical pants!

( we have booked to meet family at my sister's birthday holiday in Sitges. Spain and I shall be carrying the Prof's paperwork on his trip to Melbourne later in the year) how exciting!

Where are you going on holiday this year? I'd be interested to know!

Sitges is very gay friendly! 

We don't go on the gay beaches though

We can't find budgie smugglers to fit

Hey ho! 

Church Asides

I walked the older dogs around the Churchyard this afternoon.
Mary had already had her robust walk along the beach promenade so stayed at home with the Prof.
He was making pea and ham soup from scratch.
We've had peas soaking in the kitchen for days!
As we wandered up the Church path, St Michael's door burst open revealing the vicar in his full regalia, the morning service had just finished. George galloped up to him barking loudly.
" He's never seen a man in a frock before" I informed the vicar who laughed swishing his vestments.
I noted he was wearing new spectacles too!
Very trendy.

The soup was very nice by the way

Immortal

Trelawnyd at the turn of the Century

Yesterday I received an email from The National Library of Wales,

"Dear Mr Gray,

The National Library of Wales would like to invite you to participate in the UK Web Archive by archiving your web site (http://trelawnydhistory.blogspot.co.uk/).  The UK Web Archive is a partnership between the National Library of Wales, the British Library, and the National Library of Scotland, to preserve website for future users. We have identified this web site as an important part of Wales’ documentary heritage and would like it to remain available to researchers in the future.  The archived copy of your web site will form part of our permanent collections" 

I was tickled pink!  For now Going Gently's more serious and more worthy sister blog will be archived for future generations! Auntie Glad words will live on as will the stories of villagers past ( who could forget the animated video between Olwenna Hughes and Gwyneth Jones as they discussed  a visiting belly dancer in the village Hall!

If you want to read more about the history of the village it's characters the link is way down my right sidebar...just click on the photo of auntie Glad- Trelawnyd Voices From The Past! 

Something We Should All Do

Don't anyone dare to say what a nice guy I am......Please don't that is not why I post the following

I was a few minutes early for work  so called into sainsbury's for some dog food on the way.
Of course I treated myself to a sneaky chocolate eclair ( I know, I know) but night shift brings the devil out in a person.
The self service tills were busy and as I and a few others waited in line we watched as a tall, slightly unkempt guy tried to use his debt card to pay for a two litre bottle of coke.
The supervisor was polite and went over to speed the proceedings up, but was forced to explain that his card was some sort of social services payment card which was not valid in the store machines.
The customer began to get slightly irate and it was evident that he perhaps suffered from some mental health issues.
" I need  my coke" he stated somewhat forcefully and as the supervisor gently suggested he use some cash I could see that the store security guard was moving in to help.
I went to the next free self service till and by the time I was finished the supervisor was trying to exlain to the customer that he couldn't use a euro to pay for his drink.
The manager was called and more explainations ensued and I left slightly ashamed that I had witnessed a guy on his uppers.
The queue, like most British queues had remained unseeing.
As I drove out of the car park, I noticed the man sitting with his face in his hands in the store foyer. He had no coat and it had started to hail stone,so on impluse I stoped the car in a disabled bay, hurried into the store and took the bottle of coke which had been taken from the guy and left on the supervisor's table. I paid for it at the self sevice till and smiled at the supervisor with a it's not your fault look before giving it to the man on the bench.
" Enjoy it mate" I told the customer who took the bottle gratefully.

And on the way to work, that eclair never tasted so sweet! 

Better Late Than Never!

The postman woke me up around 1pm
No, he didn't creep up the stairs to whisper sweet nothings into my slumbering ear!
He just knocked on the door, setting off a chain reaction of hysteria amongst the animals.
" A gift from one of your blog readers!" He told me authoritatively
He seems to know me so well.

He was right! It was  a late Christmas gift from Jan in Australia.
I've only had a few hours sleep.
I am back at work later.
Snow is on the way
But it made me smile!
Thank you

Bed Soon!

Short staffed again at work so, last  night I did an extra shift and will do the same tonight.
Even after a walk all the dogs have decided to play fight, so as I am typing this ( in the bath) I wish I could give the lot of them a dose of ketamine so I can sleep.
Oh for a silent home.....with just the sound of the gale force wind whistling around my gable end
I'm too old for this lark! 

Bad Neighbours

The weather has taken a bit of a turn.
The houses, cottages and bungalows of the village seem to cling the side of Gop Hill as driving rain and gales rush in from the North West and the dogs' midday walk was cut short as all they walked to do was to turn their backs to the wind.
I only saw one person when we were out and she waved briefly as she ran for her car. I wondered if things had settled down for her, for the last time we spoke she told me of a rather unfortunate altercation she had with her neighbour soon after the new year.
The fall out was " something and nothing" over a shared right of way, but the whole thing had been exacerbated by alcohol , as the neighbour had been drinking heavily during the day.
Apparently the police were eventually called to pour oil on the waters.

I understood the difficulty felt, as once, when I was selling raffle tickets on afternoon, I had to deal with a rather unpleasant moment with the neighbour who, obviously relaxed after a couple of wines, felt that she could refuse my polite request with a brusqueness which bordered on rudeness.
Some people a mean drunks, plain and simple.

We once lived for a short time in a cottage which backed onto some social housing. Our then neighbour lived a somewhat chaotic lifestyle, in which alcohol, drugs loud partying and even louder arguments were the norm and I remember very well, that awful pit in the stomach feeling when doors were banged and shouting in the night woke you up.

Our neighbours now couldn't be better. Mandy & Sailor John have often cared for the field when we are away. Trendy Carol's dogs play wonderfully with ours and Old Trevor demands nothing more than the occasional request for me to to some heavy lifting for him ( he is 94! ) so I can understand The Prof's worry of who will eventually reside on the plot of land which has been just put up for sale, right in the centre of our corner of the village.
" Let's hope they are not riff raff!" The Prof commentated the other day